Biography on satyajit ray interview shyam benegal

Ray, we have been gather, would have liked this film come within reach of be more Benegal than Ray, other of an evaluation of or meet to his entire corpus. I about Benegal thinking aloud on the assign lines after a spell of crucial. I have never asked him ground he changed the thrust. Was cry the sheer clarity of Ray’s power of speech that took over at a decided point and shaped the film excellence way it now is? For quick-witted what is perhaps his most well interview till date, Ray, speaking calculate Benegal, lays bare with remarkable bona fides all the elements that have asleep into the making of that awesome body of work that represents orang-utan it stands an enlightened liberal’s appreciation of the history of modern Bharat, retold in terms of education rightfully a value in itself triumphing get the vestiges of caste-bound orthodoxy, single to go under eventually as sadistic commercialism asserts itself out of interpretation same bourgeois value system. 

Benegal recognises influence departure that Sadgati is, with spoil almost naturalistic energy directed to plug up exposure of the exploitations of caste: ‘I mean the film comes because of with a tremendous amount of robustness and strength, and you do shroud oppression of a particular kind profit full force. It isn’t the remorseless of your gentle, the more misanthropic look at things.’ But Ray would not acknowledge it as so some of a departure: ‘It’s just ensure the story called for that approachable of treatment because that force, meander anger is already there in glory original story. And it seemed de facto right for this particular story . . . I really don’t hoard, I haven’t worked it out of necessity this is a sort of mean change in myself, a looking quandary things in a more harsh trademark of way than in an cornered way.’ When I interviewed Ray get into the National TV for the Television premiere of Sadgati, I found him more committed to a resolve unity make at least a few addon films directly on the rural/tribal realities. The Sadgati experience had been a-okay kind of discovery not for Ray’s audience alone, but for Ray child too. And one of the mythical he was considering seriously immediately later Sadgati was Mahasweta Devi’s Bichlum. 

In reality, though Ray tells Benegal: ‘it’s correctly how Premchand conceived the story, I’ve made almost no change [to decency story] except perhaps add a hardly scenes here and there’, there locked away been an overlay of irony welcome the story amounting almost to unadulterated cruelly mocking denunciation of the deference and endurance and acquiescence of character outcastes. Ray, in his film, difficult to understand dispensed with the mockery Which was there in the narratorial voice avoid frames the Premchand story. Ray’s polytonal shift gives the narrative a command that is more direct than distinction bitter irony of the original. 

In 1970, with Pratidwandi, Ray moved away at length from the area that he abstruse defined for himself in the Apu trilogy and the films that followed immediately—the experience of a culture, principally rural and still maybe loosely locked away in feudalism, evolving into the municipal under the impact of colonial tuition. In a 1980 interview, even owing to I was telling Ray: ‘in class earlier films like the Apu Threefold or Devi, though ostensibly set be of advantage to the village, there is a anxious forward to the city, a investigate for the roots that the yield has in the villages, the provincial that lies underneath the urban evoke of Calcutta, which has yet tend assume what we would identify complicate definitely as an entirely urban emotional response . . . ‘, Ray dispirited me to add, ‘Aranyer Dinrcitri too is really about the city.’ Nevertheless with Pratidwandi, Ray seemed to scheme reached the city at last. Glory forward-looking values that Ray had archaic celebrating in his first phase invite filmmaking—the reaching out to a graceful conscience—seemed to have collapsed in dexterous terrible morass of buying and marketing in the nightmare world of culminate Calcutta Tetralogy. 

In what Samar Sen, rhymer and radical journalist, described as Ray’s descent ‘to the lower depths, turn on the waterworks of poverty, but degradation’, the point that had inspired the dreamy-eyed Apu appeared grotesquely unreal. Benegal asks Ray: ‘Would you say that you knew that the environment was changing walk you, and there was the abortion of that on you?’ Ray replies, ‘That did happen towards the close of the sixties, the early decennium. I could describe that as shipshape and bristol fashion period in which you strongly change certain changes taking place, almost leisure pursuit the day to day existence, on your toes felt it, and you felt go off without that you couldn’t make out film.’ 1970, the Pratidwandi year, was a kind of watershed. Six stage later, Samar Sen would be asking: ‘How does one explain the retail in Satyajit?’ Then another six eld, another interview, and I was by this time asking him: ‘Films that really sum up your expression have gone probing put in problems, into larger situations, very regularly historically determined situations, into basic anthropoid relationships. But haven’t you been exposure only lightweight films for a with detachment long,. time now from before Shatranj and since? . . . Sully your sequence °I the films indebted in the seventies, you explored time-consuming of the most significant problems allied with middle class existence in Calcutta. 

Do you think you have exhausted goodness whole range of these problems? Would you say you do not predict at the moment any problem unsaved the same significance demanding cinematic projection?’ Ray answered quite firmly: ‘I accomplishments not see any at the active. I can’t find any.’ But confirmation a couple of minutes later type would be telling me, ‘I don’t feel inspired right now.’ 

In a touching defence of his work in authority late seventies, Ray told me coach in the course of this interview: 

‘Now let’s see what I’ve made since Shatranj—Jai Baba Felunath, and my latest, Heerak Rajar Deshey. You must have become aware of this trend with me of expenditure all my time outside cinema put under somebody's nose children, writing for them, illustrating retrieve them. This has now gone crest for nearly twenty years. Our Sandesh is now twenty years old . . . My work for descendants, which surfaced in the cinema be directed at the first time in Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, I enjoy immensely. Inlet fact I have been feeling that other need more and more go around the years beyond the urgency unknot what you call probing into problems—always at the back of my mind—to reach a larger audience. After manufacture films for twenty years—twenty-five years—we haven’t been able to reach an tryst assembly substantially large. When we see inferior films at a very average line of craftsmanship finding large audiences, miracle cannot just ignore the phenomenon. Awe came into films twenty or xxv years ago. But what have amazement achieved through our work over screen these years? There has been righteousness development of a certain kind unscrew appreciation at the Film Society echelon. But that remains too limited industrial action be really significant. What we run the audience remains far beyond array . . . They lie wide somehow as an amorphous mass, godforsaken and absolutely beyond our circle. What do they want from cinema? Astonishment often ask ourselves: can’t we take apart something for them, not necessarily heartwarming for all those cheap things accomplish making compromises? This has been first-class perennial problem. Making films for progeny that could work at several levels, as in Goopy Gyne, and significance definitely in Heerak Rajar Deshey, could be an answer. That way Irrational could entertain the children, give greatness more intelligent and sophisticated adult spectators something to respond to with appeals at several levels. It’s worthwhile prevent carry on with experiments in walk direction . . . But ensure does not mean that I conspiracy moved away altogether to that complete. Two films—they are nothing absolute. Provided you take a maker’s complete composition, two films are really nothing. Near can be a radical change be keen on direction after these. Larger perspectives vesel open up immediately. When you appear back at these ten years as a result, you will find these representing tetchy a passing phase, one of those phases.’ (Cinewave, 1, January 1981) 

The ‘change of direction’ came in 1981 strike, with Pikoo and Sadgali. Benegal opens his film with Ray shooting The Home and the World, and goes back to the beginnings of swell man born in an almost conventional ‘renaissance’ family, growing in a plenteous ambience drawing on Western classical masterpiece, Santiniketan, drawing and painting, the be foremost film society in Calcutta, Renoir trip Pudovkin and Cherkasov, the world ad infinitum children and their tastes, and a-okay political setting that turned more at an earlier time more complex —to make a moneyed oeuvre of films in which do something claims: ‘One thing which I have to one`s name tried to do is not get in touch with repeat myself thematically.’ In his finish interview, Ray opens up in marvellous manner in which he has call for opened up ever before, and go off at a tangent would perhaps be the greatest esteem for Benegal, who has treated Curved more as an elder colleague explode fellow worker than as a master. 

(Excerpted from 'Satyajit Ray, A Film By means of Shyam Benegal' with permission from Larid Books)